


Burning Up

by newtypeshadow



Category: Iron Man (Comics), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Canon Divergence - Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Everybody Lives, Extremis Tony Stark, Fix-It, Gen, Mythical Beings & Creatures, Temporary Character Death, Tony Stark Lives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-13
Updated: 2019-07-13
Packaged: 2020-06-27 10:19:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 814
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19788856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/newtypeshadow/pseuds/newtypeshadow
Summary: Tony’s had heart attacks, but he’s never actually died until today.Which is how he discovers he may not be quite human.After all, he’saliveagain. And flying. And on fire.





	Burning Up

**Author's Note:**

> This is a Tony Lives fic. In this case, he lives specifically because of two ideas that won’t vacate my head. I mashed them together and this happened, but the exorcism failed—they’re still knocking around causing trouble.

Tony has never actually died before.

In Afghanistan, Yinsen saved him, kept his heart beating and held back the shrapnel gunning for it. And yeah, the car battery was unreliable, but Tony’s been fixing cars since he was five; it never gave out long enough to do him damage.

The Infinity Stones, though— _they_ kill him.

Tony certainly feels like he died.

He’d felt a burning all through his veins that sprawled out from his gauntleted hand across his body, felt his skin char and excruciating pain as his body met a wellspring of cosmic energy and gave way before it. It felt like he thought Extremis would feel when he tested it on himself to stabilize Pepper’s strain, the sort of pain Steve says he felt when Erskine’s serum activated: like his whole body was being engulfed in flames.

Tony had burned from the inside out, and his greatest joys and deepest regrets flooded his heart and stopped up his throat so he couldn’t speak to his loved ones watching him die.

Tony’s body burned his life out of itself. His spirit left.

But even freed from the pain of his body, Tony still feels like he’s burning. He feels like he’s turning to ash just as surely as Thanos’s army did moments ago.

And death feels like power, like freedom, like flying—and his combustion suddenly feels _good_. He sheds the crumbling shell of his armor and rockets high above the battlefield, stretches and flexes for what feels like the first time in his life and embraces the flames. Something within him snaps, a tether finally broken, and Tony _burns_.

Joyously, gloriously, brilliantly, he burns.

He’s surprised to see the living on the field are watching his spirit’s ecstatic flight. He’s dead, so how the hell can they even see him?

Why does death make him feel so alive?

Why does burning a path through the sky feel like finally coming home?

Danvers flies up to meet him high above where their friends look like ants trawling an ash heap. “That’s an interesting new look,” she tells him, alight with her own white-gold glow.

“Well-dead and extra crispy?” Tony asks, nodding down at his final resting place. “Obviously.” But he’s surprised to hear a chord in his strangely melodic voice, like he’s speaking and singing with multiple throats. That’s when he looks at himself—first with his eyes, and then from the cameras of what he instinctively knows is a Stark Industries satellite orbiting Earth.

Tony’s arms are towering walls of flame. No—they’re _wings_. He’s a gigantic fucking bird, and he’s on _fire_.

What the hell?

Wizards and aliens were weird enough without him turning into… _this_.

A firebird? A phoenix? What does this body mean he is?

No. _No_. Tony’s _human_ , and this isn’t what he looks like. He pulls himself into that old, familiar shape, calls his flight suit out from under his skin to clothe himself because he somehow knows he can, and shapes the reality of his body with the will that made him Iron Man: the suit of armor around the universe that unmade the inevitable.

Tony’s body stops burning. Stops flying.

Starts falling.

Danvers catches him, of course. Lands him safely on the ground for the second time in their two-meeting acquaintance. “Let’s not make this a habit, okay?” he says, grinning wryly.

Peter crashes into him a breath later with a force that should’ve knocked him off his feet, but instead feels lighter than Morgan jumping from bed into his arms.

Friday’s talking to him through a satellite; he hears her relieved voice inside his head. His armor’s fifty feet away in an unsalvageable heap—and missing a body. Tony breathes out his shock and hugs Peter, and asks for a sitrep that tech answers from all over the world. He sees people embrace their missing, suddenly home and safe. The world’s rejoicing. The Avengers—and company, _goddamn_ , they’ve got people from across the galaxy here… The Avengers are rejoicing too. The missing are home, and Thanos’s army is dead.

Strange sidles up when Peter, Pepper, Rhodey, Steve, and Thor have finally stopped hugging Tony.

“You couldn’t’ve warned me?” Tony asks—accusingly, which he thinks is fair, given instead of dying like a normal person, the Extremis he used on himself years ago suddenly works, and he was just an impossible flaming bird.

“Whenever I told you you were a phoenix, you didn’t believe me,” Strange says. “I thought I’d save us both the trouble.”

A phoenix then. The mythical bird that uses its death to forge itself into something new and rise from its own ashes.

Tony’s brushed death many times, and each time he rebuilt so that death couldn’t reach him by that path again. A phoenix, huh? He should’ve known.

Tony’s begotten himself from the ashes of destruction his whole life.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading—I hope you enjoyed it! If you did, please let me know via kudos and comments! ^_^


End file.
